Head of Software Engineering

1 month ago

London Area, United Kingdom Haystack Full time

Job Description

Hybrid requirements: 3 days per week in the office, London.


As part of our Software Engineering team, you’ll be joining a well-established brand, working on solutions that serve millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues. With ethical values deeply embedded in our company’s core and technology leaders who truly understand software engineers and engineering, it’s an exciting time as we redefine ourselves into a digital-first and engineering-led organization, with the quality of our engineering team being a key differentiator.


We are seeking a passionate Head of Software Engineering who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully, and operate with excellence. Creative, curious, and confident, you will be an integral part of our empowered, self-managing, multidisciplinary engineering teams—designing, building, releasing, and maintaining products. Working as an equal partner with the Product and Delivery teams, you will deliver sophisticated and robust solutions to solve challenging problems for our customers and colleagues.


You will play a key role in driving our ambition to create a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to drive this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem using exciting technologies, and do the best work of their careers.


Reports to: Senior Head of Software Engineering

Peers: Principal Engineers, Head of Product, Senior Technical Programme Managers

Team

  • 5-8 Engineering Managers (Engineering Managers are responsible for 5-9 Engineers each).
  • 6-8 Squads in a strategic Product Group (50-75 Engineers).


Key Accountabilities & Responsibilities:

The Head of Software Engineering role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:

  • Lead Software Engineering Managers to build and maintain high-quality and reliable software.
  • Responsible for the engineering excellence of their Product Group, including behaviors, operations, and technical quality.
  • Line manage and develop Software Engineering Managers to ensure they have the right skills, development plans, and a bias toward learning.
  • Maintain and cultivate effective relationships with Product and Delivery teams to prioritize, problem solve, and maximize value to market.
  • Work with the wider Technology function to implement the technical strategy, adopting the North Star principles.
  • Lead the development and improvements to standard frameworks and policies, ensuring that they are understood and adopted.
  • Write strategy papers and contribute to designing architecture to drive tech transformation and implementations.
  • Coach, support, and guide Engineering Managers and engineers to produce clean, quality code through code reviews and pair programming.
  • Drive DevOps practices to automate the Product development life cycle.
  • Foster a culture of experimentation and innovation to drive solutions.
  • Ensure products meet their SLI and SLO targets and are fully supported by teams both in and out of hours.
  • Lead development of Product Group OKRs and Product health, and demonstrate responsibility for the entire Product Group and objectives.
  • Drive the improvement and measurement of Product Group quality and reliability via software engineering best practices and metrics.
  • Orchestrate continuous learning and improvement initiatives for the Product(s) and Product Group(s).
  • Solve problems collaboratively, communicating decisions to senior stakeholders.
  • Lead product planning and roadmap with an agile mindset, focusing on supporting our colleagues.
  • Engage with product colleagues to improve value for the customer and understand ambiguous requirements.
  • Demonstrate and champion pragmatism in terms of commercial delivery and software quality.
  • Promote technology, innovation, values, and ways of working within the team and wider community.
  • Actively contribute to and lead Communities of Practice.
  • Lead recruitment and new starter onboarding activities.
  • Own and deliver initiatives to take our Technology to the next level by challenging the status quo.
  • Enhance and implement the Engineering talent strategy.
  • Foster self-management and accountability at the team level through servant leadership.
  • Support recruitment and brand outreach activities.


Tech Stack:

Our company uses a variety of technologies including:

  • React, Next.js, Typescript
  • Java
  • Kotlin
  • Swift
  • GraphQL Federation
  • Cloud: Azure
  • Observability: New Relic


Essential Experience:

  • Previous polyglot hands-on senior software engineer.
  • Excellent knowledge in all stack areas, from front-end through to back-end.
  • Extensive background in software engineering with several years of experience in a variety of systems and technologies.
  • Consistent track record in delivering, operating, leading, hiring, and shifting at Product Group level and above.
  • Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled, senior software engineers that deliver high-quality software.
  • Excellent understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering best practices.
  • Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
  • Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering.
  • Highly organized and able to handle multiple workstreams, leading senior internal customers and their expectations.
  • Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
  • Ability to lead and line manage senior engineers, engineering managers, and technical partners to a desired outcome, without prescribing it.
  • Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken, and able to adjust for different, including non-technical audiences.
  • A servant-leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership of problems.
  • Able to influence people at senior levels and from highly technical to non-technical backgrounds.


Desirable Experience:

  • Leading large product areas with 5+ teams.
  • Knowledge of Software approaches like Domain-Driven Design.
  • Previous software engineering community leadership experience.
  • Presentation delivery at internal and external events.
  • An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer, or speaker.
  • Advanced experience with cloud engineering.
  • Cares about the business and the bigger picture with significant prior examples.
  • A senior leadership mentality that is willing to take responsibility.
  • Demonstrable entrepreneurship in previous organisation(s).

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